Mission

Consortium for Open Multiphysics

Mission Statement

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Zeroth Mission

Perhaps the most important mission of this project is the formation of the consortium itself. The establishment of the OpenMultiphysics community is our 0th Mission.

The problems that this project hopes to address are, by their nature, community problems. Multiphysics development very often involves communities of developers, and the needs of multiphysics projects vary as the number of multiphysics projects. Identification of the associated problems, and specification of requirements for general solutions must be tackled by the community.

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Consortium Mission

The primary overarching objective of this consortium is, succinctly stated, to help build an infrastructure to support research, development, and production in multiphysics endeavors. The resulting work and infrastructure will help spur, accelerate, and guide discussions and efforts in providing standardized infrastructure for software integration and multiphysics in the HPC environment. It is our hope that by initiating a community supported standard for inter-application interactions, we can lower the technical and economic barriers to developing multiphysics simulation capabilities, and reduce the difficulty and complexity of implementing and evaluating new techniques for multiphysics coupling and software integration. We anticipate numerous other community benefits in addition.

How this overarching mission objective will be accomplished will be guided entirely by the OpenMultiphysics community. What follows in this section is a pilot for the consortium effort, and we hope that it can be further defined and refined by the community as it evolves.

The Consortium mission includes, but is not limited to, the following objectives:

• Initiate discussions of establishing open standards for software integration.
• Initiate discussions regarding the possibility of adopting a "universal format" for representing physical and geometrical data for our common goals.
• Help establish the objectives of the technical mission.
• Identify key technologies and help write the requirements of their implementation.
• Provide steering and guidance for the implementation of software solutions.
• Raise awareness of existing systems for multiphysics software integration and coupling.
• Identify domain-specific benchmark and test problems useful for capability V&V.

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Technical Mission

The overarching technical objective of the consortium is to provide real-world working software solutions that can be readily leveraged to address the needs of the multiphysics users and developers.

Currently, we have identified general software integration as one major technology which is common to most multiphysics systems and which consumes a great deal of resources in design and implementation. The current technical mission objectives reflect this belief, and will be further defined and refined by the consortium as it evolves and develops.

In general, we hope to:

• Develop a common, general, data-driven software integration interface through which multiple disparately developed applications can interact.
• Develop and provide examples of integrated multiphysics software solutions.
• Assemble a set of integrated capabilities that can demonstrate the V&V cases identified by the consortium.
• Enhance the modeling and simulation user experience (UX) in the HPC and desktop environments.

These, and other yet-to-be-defined objectives will initially be addressed by at least one technical approach. The consortium will help identify the strengths of each approach and guide the development towards our common requirements.

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What's with all the missions?

Multiphysics efforts almost always involve several distinct activities; physics and modeling, numerical analysis, systems design and integration, and software implementation. The groups of people conducting these activities intersect, but do not overlap completely. There is a resulting natural, social or community aspect to multiphysics projects - the management of which is often a major, but often overlooked, component of making such a project sustainable.

By providing an initial delineation between "steering-like" and "implementation-like" objectives, we are attempting to seed what we hope will be an emergent organization component to our community. We hope such an organization will help us work together towards our common goals.

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